Gray: Houston's last ranch

By Lisa Gray |
February 23, 2012

In the late '20s and '30s, tourists from other states came to the LH7 Ranch to see real Texas cowboys. (This photo is from 1928.)

Photo By Ted Rozumalski

E.H. Marks, founder of LH7 Ranch, pictured in 1966, was a second-generation cowboy, a flamboyant storyteller and the kind of Texan that New Yorkers picture when they think about Texas.

Photo By Ted Rozumalski

E.H. Marks said that he raised other kinds of cattle to make money. But he raised "old-fashioned longhorn cattle for color and romance."

Photo By Ted Rozumalski

In this 1966 photo, Marks throws out hay for for his Longhorns. Other ranchers abandoned the breed in the 1920s, favoring beefier English breeds of cattle. But Marks, who admired Longhorns' toughness, built Texas' biggest privately owned herd.

Photo By Cecil Thomson

Longhorns on the Marks family's LH7 Ranch, photographed in 1928, near the ranch's peak. The breed "possessed an adamantine strength, an aboriginal vitality, a Spartan endurance and a fierce nobility," J. Frank Dobie wrote in the 1940s.

Photo By Texas Historical Commission

Photos from the 1984 application to the Texas Historical Commission show the LH7 ranch's utilitarian buildings. This one is of the Barker General Store. Originally located in a different part of the enormous ranch, it was moved to the headquarters after its original site, near what was to be the Barker Dam, was condemned for flood-control purposes.

Photo By Texas Historical Commission

Photos from 1984 show the LH7 ranch's utilitarian buildings. This house, built in 1917, was the first thing the Marks family erected on what was then undeveloped prairie.

Photo By Texas Historical Commission

Photos from the 1984 application to the Texas Historical Commission show the LH7 ranch's utilitarian buildings. Here: The barn.

Photo By Texas Historical Commission

Photos from the 1984 application to the Texas Historical Commission show the LH7 ranch's utilitarian buildings. Here: The bunkhouse, built in 1925.

Photo By Texas Historical Commission

Photos from the 1984 application to the Texas Historical Commission show the LH7 ranch's utilitarian buildings. Here: A cattle trough.

Sometimes, when the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is running full throttle, Houston's tie to cowboying begins to seem pure showbiz, as artificial as a fried Oreo. But in point of fact, cattle were once big business here. Cowboys did, in fact, round up wild mustangs in our area. They herded cattle in what's now Hermann Park, the Medical Center, and the areas around Rice University. And they sold them in what's now River Oaks and Montrose.

Of all the ranches that used to sprawl across Harris County, the headquarters

of only one survives: the Marks LH7 Ranch, at 1010 Barker Clodine Road, next to George Bush Park in west Harris County. In its heyday in the late '20s and early '30s, the LH7 lorded more than 33,000 acres and hosted an annual rodeo on the same professional circuit as Madison Square Garden. Its owner, Emil Marks - everyone called him E.H. - was the kind of Texan that New Yorkers used to buy tickets to see, a poetry-spouting cattle hand who got rich and went bust, who helped save Texas Longhorns from extinction, and who was one of the four riders of the Houston Fat Stock Show's first trail ride, the Salt Grass, in 1952.

Marks' daughter, Maudeen, thought a museum ought to be dedicated to Marks and his ranch, and to Texas ranching in general. After she inherited the ranch homeplace, she sought help from the Harris County Heritage Society, which enthusiastically agreed that saving it was important. With the society's help, she applied to the Texas Historical Commission to designate the LH7 a state archeological landmark - the commission's highest designation, protected by the state antiquities code, the same category as San Antonio's missions and Houston's San Jacinto Battlefield. When the commission granted the ranch that status in 1985, Maudeen dreamed that the humble barn, bunkhouse and other ranch buildings could be turned into a living-history exhibit. And, at the very least, she hoped that landmark status would help her resist pressure from developers who coveted the ranch's land.

"People have great designs on it," she told Deborah Lightfoot Sizemore, author of the 1991 book The LH7 Ranch: In Houston's Shadow "The president of one corporation, a big outfit, wanted to talk to me about selling the land. They were going to come in and bulldoze the place down, and I didn't want that to happen. I said, 'How can I make you understand that I love this land and I want to be here? I was born here, and it's important for me to be here.' He said, 'I don't understand. When you look out there, all you can see is cattle. When I look out there, all I can see is buildings.' "

No one ever found money to turn the ranch into a museum. And in 2009, at age 90, Maudeen died.

Her nephew, Milo Marks, inherited the ranch headquarters and its remaining pasture, a little over 19 acres in an area developing faster than ever. Now, at Milo's request, the Texas Historical Commission is considering whether to remove the ranch's landmark status.

"The property hasn't been maintained for decades," explains Mark Wolfe, executive director of the Texas Historical Commission. "The buildings are so badly deteriorated that the owner says the property is a public nuisance, that it could hurt people who come onto the property."

The development that would take the ranch buildings' place, Wolfe says, would have a ranch theme and interpretive signs. The developers might reuse artifacts from the ranch, such as a windmill. And the ranch buildings would be painstakingly documented before they're demolished.

To me, this didn't sound like anyway to treat a state landmark - particularly Houston's last, best tie to its cowboy past.

I called Milo Marks to ask about his plans.

"We're working on a project," he said. "I'll just wait to talk until May or June. Thank you!" And with that, the phone went dead.

The man who loved longhorns

I'd like to tell you lots of stories about E.H. Marks - the man was a hoot, and Sizemore's book is delightful - but since I've got limited space, I want to talk about his longhorns.

Every year, as part of the opening ceremonies for the Marks/LH7 Rodeo, E.H. Marks paraded his longhorn herd through the ranch's arena. And every year, he knew good and well that not everybody appreciated those lean, leggy cattle.

Descended from cattle brought by Spanish settlers starting in the 1600s, the breed had been honed by centuries of running wild in the grasslands and brush of Texas and Mexico. Longhorns were shaped for survival, not the production of marbled beef. They thrived in Texas heat; they withstood ticks and fever and wolves. By the time Anglo settlers arrived in our part of Texas, longhorn cattle were more plentiful than buffalo, and they formed the enormous herds that cowboys famously drove north from Texas, over the open range.

Longhorns "possessed an adamantine strength, an aboriginal vitality, a Spartan endurance and a fierce nobility," J. Frank Dobie would write in the 1940s, when he launched the widespread movement to save the breed from extinction. By that point, the largest remaining herd was on a federal wildlife preserve.

The problem was that in the '20s, when cattlemen no longer needed cattle tough enough to walk themselves thousands of miles to market, longhorns fell quickly out of fashion. Instead, ranchers favored chunky English breeds, with their heavily marbled meat. To satisfy the market, Marks himself raised shorthorns, "whiteface" cattle, and even hump-backed Brahmans from India. But he'd grown up hearing his cowboy father's stories of driving longhorns to Dodge City, and the wily, tough breed had a charisma he couldn't resist. As early as 1923, Marks began collecting good examples of the breed, some caught wild in the East Texas Piney Woods. And in less than a decade, he had a couple hundred top-quality longhorns, said to be the biggest privately owned longhorn herd in the country - not that there was much competition. His aim, he told a newspaper reporter, was to raise Brahmans for profit, and "old-fashioned longhorn cattle for color and romance." With the open range gone, he seemed to realize, longhorns were like cowboys: appreciated not for their toughness, but for their showbiz flair.

"He was proud of them, way back there," son Travis told Sizemore. "Some people admired him for what he did, but some would say, 'My God, we've been trying to get rid of those things for a hundred years, and here he is driving those longhorns through the rodeo arena.' "

But in 1933, the bottom fell out of cattle prices, and Marks' empire began to crash. In the split with his financial partner, he lost all but a thousand acres and all the 6,000 or so cattle except his personal herd of pet longhorns. But through it all, he refused to give up. To his children, he repeated advice his own father had given him: "Emil, you hang on to that old cow's tail, and she'll pull you out." And that's what Marks did: He held on to his longhorns. The ranch never recovered its old glory, but he never went broke, either.

In March 1936, only two months after his empire had crumbled, Marks proudly provided his specialties - Texas color and romance - at the ground-breaking ceremonies for the San Jacinto Monument, an event so big that President Franklin D. Roosevelt attended. From his collection of Texana, Marks brought a 100-year-old plow to break the monument's ground. It was guided by Andrew Jackson Houston, the son of San Jacinto hero Sam Houston. And it was pulled, naturally, by Bald and Spot, two of Marks' longhorns: the embodiments of Texas, flamboyant and tough as nails, and a whole lot like their owner.